PART I
METHODOLOGICAL BACKGROUND
1
THE LIMITS OF NATIONAL FORM: NORMATIVITY AND PERFORMATIVITY IN BILDUNGSROMAN CRITICISM
When Morgenstern gave his Bildungsroman lecture in Dorpat, he could not know that roughly seven hundred miles to the west, another academic who was his exact contemporary was working on the first (and some would say the only) great aesthetic theory of the nineteenth century. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Morgenstern were born within one day of one another, but though briefly joined by this historical coincidence their lives followed different trajectories ever after. Morgensternâs career took him further and further toward geographical and intellectual obscurity when he accepted job offers in Danzig and Dorpat. Hegel, on the other hand, enjoyed increasing renown in Jena, Nuremberg, and Heidelberg and in 1818 was offered Johann Gottlieb Fichteâs former chair in philosophy at the University of Berlin. It was here, at the center of German political life, that Hegel began giving his lectures on aesthetics during the winter of 1820â21.
Hegel was far from the first German intellectual to reflect on the status of the new literary form that had come into being in the twenty-five years since the publication of Goetheâs Wilhelm Meisterâs Apprenticeship. But he was the first to integrate his thoughts into a systematic theory of aesthetics. Eighteenth-century theorists of the novel, such as Friedrich von Blanckenburg, took an essentially rhetorical approach to their task: they tried to give a technical account of how the new genre worked, how it differed from established literary forms such as the epic or the drama, and how aspiring writers might produce successful novels of their own. For Hegel, by contrast, novels (and indeed artistic objects of any kind) were interesting not in and of themselves, but because of the service they provided to systematic philosophy, whose ultimate task was to trace the unfolding of world spirit. As he puts it at the very outset of his lectures, âArt liberates the true content of phenomena from the pure appearance and deception of this bad, transitory world, and gives them a higher actuality, born of the spirit.â
Poetic literature (Poesie) occupies a privileged position in Hegelâs aesthetic system, because it is uniquely suited to mediate between the âcontentâ and âartistic formâ of the external world, imposing on both the necessary sense of closure or âtotalityâ that is a precondition for ascent into the world of the spirit. In his discussion of poetic literature, however, Hegel formulates a crucial distinction between the ancient Greek epic and the novel, which he terms âa modern bourgeois epicâ (2:1092). The former encounters totality as an external given, in the âtotal world of a nation and epochâ (2:1044); the latter, on the other hand, takes as its subject the collision between the âpoetry of the heart and the opposing prose of external circumstancesâ (2:1092). To illustrate what Hegel has in mind, it is useful to contrast Homerâs Achilles with Goetheâs Wilhelm Meister. Achillesâ life is characterized by a fundamental congruity between form and content: he is a warrior, and all his actions can be related to this basic fact. At the same time, his destiny is inseparable from that of the people whom he leads, and it would have never occurred to an ancient bard to question whether Achilles might perhaps better serve the Achaians by being something other than he actually is. By contrast, Wilhelm Meisterâs nature and calling are far from clear throughout much of his development. He believes himself to be born for the theater, and most of Goetheâs plot is given over to a series of trials in which this belief collides with the actual life of an actor. How Meisterâs life relates to that of the people around him is also far from certain, and the novel tries out various forms of the social contract before eventually giving preference to the Tower Society.
In Hegelâs novel theory, then, totality does not exist as something that is pre-given. Instead, it comes about over the course of the work as the protagonist struggles for a compromise between the poetic form within and the prosaic reality without. This process is teleological, because everything that happens finds its ultimate justification in the endpoint of the narrative. In Hegelâs words, âIn the modern world [the heroâs] struggles are nothing more than years of apprenticeship [Lehrjahre]âŠand thereby acquire their true significanceâ (1:593). The very next sentence makes clear, however, that Hegel regards this âtrue significanceâ with great skepticism, judging it as falling short of a true reconciliation between poetic form and prosaic content. More often than not, he claims, the protagonist will simply submit to the pressures of external reality: âThe end of such apprenticeship consists in this, that the subject sows his wild oats, accommodates himself with his wishes and opinions to existing relationships and their rationality, enters the concatenation of the world, and acquires for himself an appropriate attitude to itâ (1:593).
Hegel remained skeptical of the novel because, unlike the classical epic with its divine, semidivine, or at least nobly born heroes, the novel is condemned to search for a redemptive totality in the life of a more or less random individual. It can therefore offer only a âsubjectiveâ perspective on the world. An âobjectiveâ perspective that would have universal meaning is reserved for the philosophical sciences, which is why âpoetry [appears] as that particular art in which art itself begins at the same time to dissolve and acquire in the eyes of philosophy its point of transition to religious pictorial thinking as such, as well as to the prose of scientific thoughtâ (2:968). Indeed, it is by now a bit of a critical commonplace to refer to various other parts of Hegelâs philosophical system, especially the Phenomenology of Mind, as a âBildungsroman of the spirit.â
The three characteristics of Hegelâs novel theory that I have just outlined (the search for totality in the life of an individual, the staging of this struggle in a teleological narrative, and the yearning for an objective supplement to the merely subjective totality supplied by artistic description) all tie his aesthetic system to the philosophical concept of Bildung as it was articulated in German idealism during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the second chapter of this book, I will outline a revisionist model of Bildung that detaches it from its idealist interpretations and restores it to its roots in the mid-eighteenth century. First, however, I will outline how an implicit commitment to totality, teleology, and normativity has shaped the critical discourse on the Bildungsroman for the past two centuries, and what an alternate approach to the genre might look like. On the basis of such an alternate model, I will then develop some larger hypotheses about the purpose of literary study, and derive from them some methodological strictures that I intend to follow in this book.
Novel Criticism and the âUnchanging Unity of the Idealâ
One of the foundational texts for all idealist theories of Bildung is Friedrich Schillerâs Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, published in 1795, the year that also saw the publication of Wilhelm Meisterâs Apprenticeship. In the fourth letter of this collection, Schiller argues that âevery individual human beingâŠcarries within him, potentially and prescriptively, an ideal man, the archetype of a human being, and it is his lifeâs task to be, through all his changing manifestations, in harmony with the unchanging unity of this ideal.â This statement expresses two of the three characteristics that I highlighted about Hegelâs aesthetic theory: that all human beings carry within themselves the prescription for an âidealâ existence, and that the realization of this ideal presents itself teleologically, as a âlifeâs task.â Soon after, Schiller addresses the third characteristic as well, providing an âobjective formâ to complement the merely subjective dimensions of Bildung: âThis archetype, which is to be discerned more or less clearly in every individual, is represented by the state, the objective and, as it were, canonical form in which all the diversity of individual subjects strive to uniteâ (93). Already in Schillerâs account then, written at a time when Germany was still paralyzed by the provincial sectionalism of the Holy Roman Empire, the state emerges as the âobjective and canonicalâ form of the inner potential of man. In order to achieve subjective completion, individual human beings must strive for some kind of âharmonyâ with its unalterable unity.
It quickly becomes apparent, however, that Schillerâs understanding of the state differs from our contemporary approach to the term. As he explains, the correspondence between individual subject and state can be achieved in one of two ways: âeither by the ideal man suppressing empirical man, and the state annulling individuals; or else by the individual himself becoming the state, and man in time being ennobled to the stature of man as ideaâ (93, emphasis in original). The first of these possibilities (âthe state annulling individualsâ) emits an undeniably totalitarian odor, and present-day readers of Schiller will no doubt be reminded of Fascist Germany or Stalinist Russia by his claims that the diversity of human subjects invariably strives to gain a canonical form in the state. Schiller is well aware of the dangers that lie ahead down this road, and consequently advocates for the second alternative: âA political constitution will still be very imperfect if it is to achieve unity only by suppressing variety. The state should not only respect the objective and generic character in its individual subjects; it should also honor their subjective and specific characterâ (94). âOnce man is inwardly at one with himself,â Schiller continues, âhe will be able to preserve his individuality however much he may universalize his conduct, and the state will be merely the interpreter of his own finest instinct, a clearer formulation of his own sense of what is rightâ (94â95). The bulk of Schillerâs study is then concerned with elucidating how man might become âinwardly at one with himselfâ through a process of aesthetic education in which âsense impulseâ (mutable life) and âform impulseâ (eternal shape) are united with one another in a process of free play of the mental faculties.
The early reception history of Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man coincided with a tumultuous period in German history that witnessed, first, heated intellectual debates about the significance of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, and then the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the first stirrings of genuine nationalism during the Wars of Liberation. Schillerâs notion that human beings might give the law unto the state rather than vice versa if they only developed their inner faculties to a sufficient extent was quickly seized on by German intellectuals and developed into a programmatic alternative to the French Revolution. Almost immediately, this discourse also became linked with Wilhelm Meisterâs Apprenticeship, a book that Goetheâs contemporaries now read not only as an exemplary depiction of a manâs aesthetic education, but also as a veiled political program. The romantics began writing novels in the Meister tradition, and as Todd Kontje has shown, almost all the enduring examples of their kind (e.g., Ludwig Tieckâs Franz Sternbaldâs Wanderings [1798], Novalisâs Heinrich von Ofterdingen [1800], and Jean Paulâs The Awkward Age [Flegeljahre, 1804]) feature protagonists who seek to improve themselves through the medium of literature. As Kontje also remarks, however, the phase of optimistic trust in the possibilities of an aesthetic educationâa Bildung that might discover its ideal purpose in literatureâwas comparatively short-lived. Already satirized in Jean Paulâs The Awkward Age, it was thoroughly deconstructed by E. T. A. Hoffmann in his The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1819â21).
Hegelâs lectures, with their distrust of literary description as a merely âsubjectiveâ realization of the ideal, can ...